An Introduction to Expression Engine – Content Management System
We have featured updates and views on various publishing platforms online over a period of time. Publishing of course referring to the whole concept of setting up a content driven website. One such platform we have mentioned fleetingly yet is a popular enough name in the world of content management online is Expression Engine. Though it doesn’t have the monstrous open source evangelism of Wordpress or Text Pattern, it has its share of loyal users and is a much admired CMS. This post aims to give a brief introduction to the content management system.
The team at Expression Engine calls it the most flexible content management system you will ever meet. It is a paid platform with a free core version which obviously has limited features. Like a true content champ EE goes beyond a typical blogging platform like Wordpress (though it is fast gaining pace as a CMS onto itself) and includes modules that can add forums, photo galleries, member mangers, wikis and even commerce. However, despite its un-open source nature EE runs in a LAMP environment and requires PHP 4.1 or higher to install and run. Besides the free core, there are two other versions which cost $100 and $250 respectively.
As you might have noticed from the above gist of EE, it is a high end and very flexible CMS system. It essentially is more robust than WP while more easy to use and build than Drupal which to my mind is a framework more than a CMS. In the past year or two we have seen a spate of new content driven websites, with a lot of offline publishing names getting their feet wet online. And to be honest, most of them have shabby websites with a stunning lack of design sense. A system like Expression Engine can help most of these sites get the flexibility they need while focusing purely on the design and usability and leaving the back end to EE’s modules and if required their support staff. And perhaps we can get to see some clean and valid websites and a beautiful web in general.
The clear advantage of Expression Engine lies in its flexibility and varied modules. Right from managing multiple websites with a single installation to the near complete content modules, EE has made every part of a website click-made. If it is pure content management it has all the features one is used to in WP and a little more, article and comment pagination for instance. Also it offers a lot more control than other blog platforms, for instance it has a module that let’s the author choose related posts to an article from a drop down rather than relying on the algorithm of a plugin. That in essence is the major advantage of EE, everything is built in instead of add-ons and plugins. A better typography manager and spam control system only adds to the charm that is enhanced by a far superior multi author system. And with modules that include forms, wikis, RSS customzation and member manger and add to that a mailing list manager, Expressions Engine can help build a powerful system within the secure environments of your server.
The biggest downfall if one can call it one is without doubt the price. The free version is essentially just a blogging platform and none of the features that make EE flexible is not available with it. Even after purchasing the system, version updates include a yearly subscription charge. Even the two paid versions essentially is just to distinguish commercial users from personal non-commercial users with commercial usage attracting the added cost, and not just for the preliminary purchase but even for additional modules. Another notorious disadvantage among its users is ironically its huge feature set, EE simply offers too much at times for relatively simple projects.
Given these reasons EE is ideally suited and heavily recommended for commercial publications like the NYTimes clones and other powerful content driven websites with huge author lists and reader base. Comparing with other CMS Movable Type is a name that strikes a resemblance to what Expression Engine has to offer and recently they have taken a couple of strides ahead of many of their counterparts. However, can these systems really take on the open source might and the ‘free’dom that platforms like Text Pattern and Wordpress provide?
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